Environment
I've been reading about the relative habitability of various extremely inhospitable environments on Earth and I have to ask—to your mind, how easy would it be for humanity (whether now, with current technology, or at some point in the future when technology will (presumably) be more advanced) to colonize...
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Antarctica (Antarctic cities located on the western coast of the continent, for instance);
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mostly uninhabited deserts (namely hot deserts and their interiors), e.g. the Sahara or Atacama (maybe cities among or under the sands piping desalinated water from coastal regions);
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the atmosphere (think of aerostats tethered to the Earth's surface but buoyed in the air by some giant container of a gas or gasses lighter than air);
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subterranean environments (underground—think truly vast underground cities or massive communities living in huge caves, subway systems, or mines, for example); or
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the ocean(s)—whether
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the ocean surface (namely
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floating communities (think floating platform cities or truly monumental cruise ship-type communities) or
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fixed seasteads (think of a gigantic oil platform-type situation)),
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underwater (a Sealab-type community, say) or even
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subterranean or subglacial bodies of water (some kind of gargantuan structure built within underground or subglacial lakes or oceans)?
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I'm highly intrigued by the possibility of getting some decent input and weigh-ins on these concepts. Would you order these potential future environments by ease of habitability and, if so, what would you rate their relative states of habitability ordered, say, from most to least habitable?
Thank you!